Free Energy Pioneer- John Worrell Keely

by Theo Paijmans

  What else are we, for instance, to make of an incident that occurred on Friday in April 1897, during the great 19th century airship wave? A Mr. Hopkins, described as an "elderly Christian Gentleman," encountered the airship when it landed in a valley in the vicinity of Springfield. "As the sun shone upon it the rays were reflected as from burnished aluminum. It rested upon four legs or supports, which raised it from the ground sufficiently to give room for two wheels like the propeller of a ship lying horizontally; one at the bow and one at the stern. Another at the stern lying perpendicularly was evidently for the purpose of propelling the vessel ahead, while the other two raised the vessel. The vessel itself was about twenty feet long and eight feet in diameter and the propellers about six feet in diameter."

  Hopkins also had a chance to study the interior of the strange craft: "In the side was a small door. I looked in. ...From the ceiling was suspended a curious ball, from which extended a strip of metal, which he struck to make it vibrate. Instantly the ball was illuminated with a soft, white light, which lit up the whole interior. ... At the stern was another large ball of metal, supported in a strong frame-work and connected to the shaft of the propeller. At the stern was a similar mechanism attached to each propeller and smaller balls attached to a point of metal that extended from each side of the vessel and from the prow. And connected to each ball was a thin strip of metal similar to the one attached to the lamp. He struck each one and when they vibrated the balls commenced to revolve with intense rapidity, and did not cease till he stopped them with a kind of brake. As they revolved intense lights, stronger than any arclight I ever saw, shone out from the points at the sides and at the prow, but they were of different colors. The one at the prow was an intense white light. On one side was green and the other red. ...I pointed to the balls attached to the propellers. He gave each of the strips of metal a rap, those attached to the propeller under the vessel first. The balls began to revolve rapidly, and I felt the vessel begin to rise."38

  The remarkable description immediately conjures up images of Keely's vibratory system. Was this then a description of Keely's antigravity propulsion in all its grandiose completeness? This seemingly easy-to-find explanation only loses its easiness when we learn that the two human-looking occupants, a man and a woman, whom poor Hopkins encountered, were stark naked. They were able to communicate a bit through sign language though, and the male occupant pointed to the sky and made a noise that sounded to Hopkins like "Mars."

  Was Hopkins referring to Greg's, Delisle Hay's, Cromie's or Astor's novels in a veiled sense? And how was it then that Hopkins, a devote Christian, would possibly describe two totally naked, golden-haired persons in connection with a highly advanced and sophisticated aerial craft?

  A possible solution might be that Hopkins was hinting at something deeper while using a metaphor; for in Hopkins' letter he speaks of the two occupants as "Adam and Eve." We could dismiss this phrase as a typical 19th century expression of nakedness. We could interpret Hopkins words as a hint at Keely's inventions, which were animated by "the breath of God," the same breath that also gave life to Adam. It remains open to conjecture if Hopkins indeed was alluding to the beautiful innocence of Keely's vibratory science. While the naked man and woman are age-old alchemical symbols for the opposing forces, thirty-four years later and buried deep in the German occult substrata, the German Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft which would take both Keely's and Bulwer-Lytton's concepts into the twentieth century, devoted a whole chapter in their second booklet with the title, "The World Apple. Why Were Adam and Eve Not Allowed to Break the Apple of the Tree of Knowledge?" Significantly, in this chapter the Berlin group made certain technical and physical conclusions concerning vril-energy.

  And what are we to make of an incident that occurred in Mitchell, South Dakota, years after the airship wave? Herbert V. DeMott claimed that in 1906, when he was 10 years old, he saw a "craft" land near a well. A door opened and the young DeMott was invited inside the object. There he was welcomed by two ordinary-looking men sitting on what looked like camp stools. During their conversation, the men refused to tell him where they came from, but they did tell him something about the propulsion system of their "airship." "The outer shell of the craft was filled with helium gas, and when the lever was moved the magnetism from the earth was cut off, allowing the craft to rise." As a strange allusion to Keely's early experiments involving water to be used to obtain his vaporic force, the men took water through a hose "to be used in making electricity."39 What is also disturbing, since this account stands not on its own, is that these more or less "normal" accounts are interspersed with even stranger encounters, of which plenty are found in UFO lore.

  What we do know is that Astor was intimately connected to Keely, who used the same term to describe his force. Hart's puzzling statements of the airship going to Cuba obtains another dimension when we learn that Astor, who wrote about spaceships traveling through the solar system on apergy, was at one time a staff officer in Cuba to General Shafter in the Spanish-American War. Interestingly, Kinraide's researches in x-rays and his invention of the Kinraide coil also have a minor connection to the Spanish-American War: four ships involved in the conflict were outfitted with x-ray equipment, and a detailed summary of the U.S. Army's experience with x-rays in this war was eventually compiled, showing the importance of their use for medical ends. While Hart alleged that the airship inventor was of Cuban descent, we must not forget that New Yorker Louis Senarens too, who also profusely wrote of air and spaceships, was of Cuban descent. Also, Hart's stressing of the usage of electric storage batteries has been interpreted as a scheme of promoting the use of these batteries. However, it was Senarens who was the first person to propose that an air vessel be driven by electric engines powered by storage batteries. Under closer examination, Senarens' literary work suddenly yields a link to Keely.

  It would also be easy to dismiss Dellschau's incredible tale as the ranting of an unstable mind, the idea of an exclusive underground with advanced technology as pure speculation, and Keely's inventions as a mere delusion, even when we take the strange whispered rumors of the Oroville community and the accomplishments of other free-energy inventors into account.

  Since no positive evidence has surfaced that the Sonora Aero Club and the even more mysterious NYZMA did exist outside Dellschau's coded plates, others have suggested that Dellschau was indeed drawing solely from his imagination. And since only fragments of all those other incredible inventions are all that is left to us now, we are not in the position to draw any definite conclusion. But when we take all those similarities and possible metaphors into account, it very well could be that, through widening the scope of our research, we have by chance stumbled upon a very secretive underground of which we have for the first time uncovered its dim outlines.

  It is alleged that Dellschau was a furtive man, as if in fear for his life. He also took take great pains to hide his messages in code. We therefore might as well scan all data for codes, metaphors, and hidden messages of which there are enough.

  It is quite possible that Greg, Astor, Delisle Hay and Senares employed codings in their fanciful tales. This notion is not easily discarded; their writings have never before been the subject of such a search. In Astor's A Journey In Other Worlds, for instance, we find a company of the novel's heroes more than once seated at Delmonico's. Delmonico's was a restaurant that very much existed in the real world; Tesla used to dine there quite often. The names of the four protagonists each begin with a successive letter of the alphabet - a, b, c, and d.

  In the titles of two of Senarens' tales that were influenced by Keely's inventive mind, we find at least a symbolic summary, a metaphor so to speak if we allow some poetic insight, and perhaps here we intuitively feel an expression of the growing hope and bitter disillusionment of the whole episode without precisely knowing what its sad contents are. We do feel, however, that in this highly complex episode there is enough symbology to somehow suggest that various and as yet unidentifi
ed opposing historical forces or fractions were at work. In one tale, published in 1897, the year that the airship wave struck large parts of the United States and reached its peak, Senarens named his spaceship "The Shooting Star." A year later, when the great wave stopped, Keely died and his antigravity devices disappeared from the pages of history. Senarens partially titled his tale involving yet another spaceship "The Sinking Star."

  But there are other, spidery connections of a more tangible nature in this strange episode. Keely's alleged exposure was published for the first time in a New York newspaper that was owned by wealthy multimillionaire William Randolph Hearst. Hearst also played a significant role in the great airship wave, a role that has never been properly explained but that has been labeled by one author as "deliberate misdirection."

  One of the newspapers that most heavily covered news about the airship was Hearst's San Francisco Examiner. Its tone was one of complete skepticism and even scathing sarcasm. But meanwhile across the continent, the New York Morning Journal took a completely opposite viewpoint and even went so far as to positively assert that the airship was a reality. Strangely, this newspaper was also owned by Hearst.

  Who then was Hearst? Not only puissantly rich, he also desperately wanted to be the president of the United States, and he was the prime catalyst which sent America into the Spanish-American War. The prelude to that conflict was fanatically developed by Hearst in his newspapers side by side with news about the great airship. In this light, Hart's statements of the airship as a weapon for stamping out Spanish rule in Cuba, juxtaposed with Dellschau's assertion that the Sonora Aero Club dreaded the use of their airship designs as a possible weapon, obtains an unnerving meaning.

  The question, asked by author Paris Flammonde, looms large: why was Hearst, an extremely wealthy publisher and financier with political ambitions and deeply involved in America's international and military affairs, directing his editors on each coast to present different and even contradictory news on the airship?

  Adding to the strangeness is that while the scathing cynicism came from a newspaper that published news on the airship-sightings in the same locale as the events, assurances of authenticity came from a newspaper that was published on the other side of the country. "Hearst was a man of singular ability, a gambler for the highest stakes and a man of sweeping imagination. He did nothing without a very good reason. What did America's most aggressive newspaperman know about the great airship that he wished to have obscured?" muses Flammonde.40 And we might also add, what, if anything, could Hearst possibly have known about the nature of Keely's inventions that he so desperately wished to have obliterated from the pages of history?

  13

  Into the Realms of Speculation Anomalous Documentation and Mythological Tales

  "It is in the arcana of dreams that existences merge and renew themselves, change and yet keep the same — like the soul of a musician in a fugue."

  Bram Stoker,

  The Jewel of Seven Stars, 1903

  "In every name there is a hidden force, and when we repeat that name over and over again... we draw into our blood that spiritual force which... in time, finally transforms our whole body. "

  Gustav Meyrink,

  Das Grune Gesicht, 1916

  Recently, Joscelyn Godwin raised the important question of interpretation. He asks if one should draw the line between what one can read into an author's work, given a certain key or method, and what the author actually wrote.1 The same may be said for any amount of data or information. Should one arrive at its conclusions in a linear and, by the absence of other data, limited sense, or should one try to create other possibilities by leaving the rigid, linear trail by application of different methods?

  The Keely history, which at times has been a journey into little-expected areas, has delivered an amount of data that can be divided into two classes: the nonanomalous data and the anomalous data. With the nonanomalous data concerning Keely and his discoveries at hand, I have reconstructed development of the Keely mystery in a historical sense.

  The amount of anomalous data asks for a different approach. To approach these in a confined and orthodox sense would mean to discard the strange details, analogies and correlations as if they were irrelevant detritus that all history has clogging at its periphery. But one might choose to ignore; in an unguarded moment, one is uncomfortably tapped on the shoulder and again reminded of these incongruencies. With the anomalous data, we are able to create a parallel history, a speculative framework of alternatives and possibilities. Those possibilities based on speculations and suppositions may be eliminated or substantiated in due time through careful and thorough research. What remains after such an examination is valid and may be added to the set of nonanomalous data that we have now.

  At the end of the previous chapter I left the trail of that which is verified by hard documentation, and instead concentrated on applying a different method of interpretation by pointing out similarities in text and content. This might be a point of criticism, but the very nature of the events demand that we take that course. The historian may be reasonable and orderly; history is not. History is far more than documents in archives; history is also largely composed of that for which there is no means of documentation. History is not a set of well-outlined and sharply defined incidents, arranged in a logical fashion. Some of its most far-reaching causes — such as the hint, the metaphor, the influence of ideas, the sudden impulse or the interchange of concepts — often come and go unacknowledged, especially in the fields of the occult, the irrational and the alternative sciences.

  When we further overstep the boundaries of our conventionalism and our consensus of what we think that reality consists of, we may also glimpse that other reality, which is partly the world of the highest occultist. We may perceive another surrealist dimension: not so much a tangible one that is backed by historical documentation, but one that stretches out across the ages, across little-known events, in the air that is still stale of incense after a ceremony or a ritual; in a room that is still resonating after a heated discussion, in the unspoken philosophies of forgotten dreamers and in the curious encrypted analogy of legend, symbol, name, locality, and language.

  Verne was keenly aware of Keely's discoveries, and some of it was printed in The Hunt for the Golden Meteor that was published posthumously in 1908. How could he not have been aware as he wrote the foreword to Cromie's novel. He admitted that he could only read "those works which have been translated into French"2 but we have seen elsewhere that information on Keely's researches also appeared in the French language. "I esteem myself fortunate as having been born in an age of remarkable discoveries, and perhaps still more wonderful inventions," Verne told an interviewer in the autumn of 1894, "I always took numerous notes out of every book, newspaper, magazine or scientific report that I came across. ...I subscribe to over twenty newspapers... and I am an assiduous reader of every scientific publication. ...I keenly enjoy reading or hearing about any new discovery or experiment..."3

  There are circumstances, however, that suggest that Keely could have been affiliated with Verne in a distinctly other way, by sharing a membership in a little-known society called the Angelic Society. The Angelic Society truly bore the mark of a secret society as there exists no membership roll accessible in the archives of the Western world. The name of this order lacks in even the most learned studies of secret societies. Verne's membership and the existence of the Angelic Society itself were established relatively recently by French author Michel Lamy, through an original method of interpretation, the careful dissection of their writings, and the unriddling of codings therein.

  Lamy argues convincingly that Verne's writings were "entirely dedicated to the transmission of a message," and have "reflected the thought not of one man, but of a community."4 After all, of Verne's life Lamy remarked that, "The end of his life has been marked by a profound loneliness, a curious melancholy of being," and he further wonders: "But the whole of his existence was inscribed
by the sign of the unknown. His wife, Honorine, felt haunted by some incomprehensible mystery that he would not share with anybody. ...Why did Jules Verne, before he died, burn hundreds of letters, personal papers, his unedited manuscripts and his account books? ...What has become of the 3,000 or 4,000 square words that he wrote and left his son Michel? Who has destroyed them? Are they really lost?"5

  And indeed, Lamy makes us question what we really know, or thought we always knew about the great French author. When interviewed in the autumn of 1894, Verne showed the greatest reserve as to biographical details and it was with reluctance that he discussed his life or his books.6 Naturally we find no mention of Verne's membership in the Angelic Society in the interviews, and for this we must again turn to Lamy's researches. Set on the trail of this mysterious society by the writings of little-known late 19th century writer on cryptography Grasset d'Orcet, Lamy compiles the membership of this society as consisting of Andre Dumas, Gerard de Nerval, George Sand, Jules Verne, numerous painters and artists of all nationalities and others.7

  The Angelic Society was founded in Lyon in 1562 by a German named Sebastian Greif. After a while the society, closely allied to freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, named itself simply "Le Brouillard" meaning "mist" or "fog." Lamy points towards "Phileas Fogg" in Verne's A Journey Around the World in Eighty Days and his membership of the Reform Club, of which its initials "R" and "C" stand for Rosy Cross. We might add that the legend of the Rosicrucians first appeared during the reformation. Phileas, according to Lamy, has the same meaning as poli-philo, "lover of all," and he asserts that the Angelic Society possessed a curious book titled Songe de Poliphile.8